March 11, 2008

Anciently Civilized But Not Yet K-Mature

We are an ancient civilization. A five thousand year old civilization. As a child, this used to fill me with a fair amount of pride, and even more so after reading Nehru’s Discovery of India, which was my first detailed non-academic introduction to history.

At least technically this might be true, though I am not very sure what civilization in real life means. So ours is actually an ancient civilization going by the historiographical terminology. However, we are not yet mature enough to allow public kissing between a man and a woman.

And we also have a lot of free time. Lots and lots. One of the ways it is killed is by filing cases against people for things like kissing in public.

So much so that now no less than the Supreme Court is going to hear an urgent plea by Richard Gere (an actor I don’t particularly like) ‘seeking stay of his arrest warrant in connection with the kissing row involving actress Shilpa Shetty’ (an actress I don’t particularly like).

Did someone mention that we are a super power of legality and chastity? Have been for a long time.

Never mind the ancient K-treatise or the medieval K-temple. Let’s wait and see where the modern K-case goes. The future of the country hangs in balance.

And all those irresponsible people are wasting time talking about the mass-K-cases in the G-state. What’s the insignificant K’ing of a few thousand people as compared to this monumental Katastrophe threatening the very moral fabric of our ancient civilization?

What does it matter? But the linguistic nature of ‘very’ in that preceding sentence seems very interesting.